Kyle Veazey's Late Hits: On Ole Miss-Texas, Memphis' progress, and 'throwin' the A' at Arkansas

Mississippi head coach Hugh Freeze reacts to an official's call in the first half of their NCAA college football game against LSU in Baton Rouge, La., Saturday, Nov. 17, 2012. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

As in BYU's 40-21 destruction of Texas, the Rebels' opponent in Saturday's much-anticipated game. As in the 679 yards, nearly four-tenths of a mile, BYU gained while doing so. As in the injury that knocked Texas quarterback David Ash out of the game and jeopardizes his availability Saturday. As in the turmoil of a warming seat for UT coach Mack Brown and the eventual Sunday afternoon dismissal of his defensive coordinator, Manny Diaz.

All of which adds up to a pretty logical conclusion: Ole Miss can, should, and will beat Texas Saturday night in Austin.

It's the perfect storm, isn't it? This isn't the fearsome Texas, the team Ole Miss should go play and hope for the best. This is a crippled one, and it provides the perfect opening for the Rebels.

It's true, yes, that Ole Miss didn't look altogether impressive in its win over Southeast Missouri. But that's incredibly misleading. The Rebels went with backups in the second half, turning that 31-0 blowout of a halftime score into the less impressive 31-13 final. All that does, though, is speak to Ole Miss' lack of depth. And -- newsflash here -- the Rebels will go to Texas trying to win with their first string, not their backups. That means Bo Wallace, Donte Moncrief, Jeff Scott and Laquon Treadwell, among others, and surely that's a more formidable group of offensive players than anything BYU had.

If the problem for the Longhorns is tackling, the solution isn't facing a fast, wide-open offense with fast playmakers like the one Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze runs.

A win over this version of the Longhorns still won't equate into wins over the Alabamas of the world. But in Ole Miss' quest to turn a pretty good season into a great one, it's a fine start.

Progress for the Tigers?

The party line out of Memphis' 28-14 loss to Duke Saturday afternoon at the Liberty Bowl was 'progress.' And maybe that's correct. Maybe that's a product of just how downtrodden this team was last year. Perhaps it's a product of people really, badly wanting to be able to proclaim progress. Maybe it's a combination of both.

The box score's reality is this: Memphis did only have 12 first downs Saturday. It collected just 237 yards. And it was but 2-for-13 on third down. Sure, it's safe to assume Memphis will do better than 237 yards per game this year. But here's what 237 will get: Fifth-worst in the Bowl Subdivision in the early-season small sample size.

Then again, there's last year's Duke game, when the Tigers had but nine first downs, 152 total yards and were even worse (!) on third down: 1-for-11.

Which means that, yes, Saturday was progress. Just being in the game in the fourth quarter against Duke was, indeed, progress. But more than anything else, it underscores just how far the Tigers have to go, too.

While we're on the topic...

-- Memphis announced a crowd of 44,237 for Saturday's home opener at Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium. To put that in perspective, I searched Tiger home openers going back to the mid-1990s at the school's website, looking for a larger home-opening crowd. If you take out games against Ole Miss and Mississippi State, two schools that could inflate the attendance number on their own due to their own large local following, I couldn't find a larger home-opening crowd. And as Memphis' own notes say, it was the largest crowd for a non-SEC opponent at the Liberty Bowl since 2005.

-- You're aware that Tom Hornsey's 79-yard punt was the second-longest in school history, behind only Roland Eveland's 85-yard punt in a 1950 game against Washington. But there's more. I looked in ESPN.com's stat archives for the past few years and tried to compare Hornsey's punt to the final national rankings of longest punts of the year, and here's what I found: It would have been second-longest in 2008, third-longest in 2011, fourth-longest in 2012, 2009 and 2007, and sixth-longest in 2010.

-- WMC-TV sports director Jarvis Greer made his debut as the color analyst for Tiger football broadcasts Saturday. When I listened in the first half, he was a natural in the ease with which he helped carry the broadcast along, but more analysis, as the title implies, would've been helpful.

Throwin' the 'A'

Arkansas is 2-0 with wins over Louisiana-Lafayette and Samford, but it's clear that the real coup of the season is a new hand gesture that appears to be catching on. It's calling 'throwin' the A', and I've done some public service journalism for you here in compiling some of the best, well, throws:

-- Miami had a T-shirt for sale at its website with the score of its 21-16 win over Florida within hours of the game going final Saturday. And the website was even further prepared to capitalize on the win: As of 6:30 p.m., the lead story was pushing second-chance season tickets; the secondary story was the actual game recap.

-- Here's a name you'll probably start to hear more of: Tulane plackekicker Cairo Santos, last year's Lou Groza Award winner. He has made 24 consecutive field goals, which brings that all-time record of consecutive made field goals into sight. Washington's Chuck Nelson holds the record, having made 30 in a row in 1981 and 1982.

-- Hope you caught the stern warning given to media members at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in Oxford Saturday. I posted it on my Facebook.

-- Remember Sara and David Adams of East Memphis, who I mentioned in last week's column were having a gender reveal tailgate? Well, the verdict is in: It's a girl.

Disciplined Vols?

Yes, the opponents were merely Austin Peay and Western Kentucky. But in Tennessee's first two games in the Butch Jones era, the Vols have incurred merely two penalties for 17 yards. (Both came against WKU.) Last season, Tennessee was the fourth-most penalized team in the Southeastern Conference.

Oh, and while we're on the topic: In each of the last three seasons, Alabama has been the SEC's least penalized team.

And since this column promises to be fair, even-handed and contextual, it is worth noting that the opponent was Alcorn State.

Egg Bowl stock report

In our weekly feature, we calibrate our Egg Bowl prediction with the week's results. And since the week featured an Ole Miss win over Southeast Missouri and a Mississippi State win over Alcorn State -- snores all around -- it's hard to make it budge.

So we'll stay with Ole Miss by 5.

This week should provide a bit of an opening for movement, what with Ole Miss heading to Texas and Mississippi State traveling to Auburn.

Baylor throttled Buffalo 70-13 Saturday, and that box score in and of itself is quite the sight. But to me, it's just an entry point into what Baylor's season composite box score looks just two games in.

OK, Baylor has played Buffalo and Wofford, I get that. But the two-game total is amazing: 139 points, 64 first downs, 1,473 yards, four punts, 14-for-23 on third down. Baylor is averaging just a few inches shy of a first down every time it lines up for a play, as it averages 9.7 yards per play.

Amazing, no? Baylor will begin to come back to the real world when it hosts Louisiana-Monroe Saturday and then when it hosts West Virginia on Oct. 5.

Time lapses!

I mean, really: Who doesn't love a good time lapse video? So here's one I saw from Ole Miss-Southeast Missouri State last night: